By Virginia Winder

A compelling need to find his Polish ancestors sent Taranaki man Ray Watembach on a 35-year journey of discovery.

"For a number of years I had this feeling that an old lady was alive, calling me back to Poland."

And she was.

But Ray didn't find her the first time he went, back in 1966.

Instead, he found trouble.

In his search for Dodunski or Watembach family members, the young Kiwi arrived in Communist Poland. "There were tanks in the streets, machinegun posts in the Post Offices. There were no such things as bright lights in Warsaw."

During the Cold War era all tourists were meant to be interrogated each day by Communist authorities, but not Ray.

"When I was interrogated the first time, I disliked it intensely and replied to every question in Maori," he says, explaining how he grew up in Waitara, spending much of his time at the Owae Marae.

"They thought I was a lunatic and shoved me out of their office. After that first day, I went AWOL (absent without leave)."

He travelled freely - until he went to leave the country.

Riot on platform

Purposely, railway officials had placed him on the back end of a train heading to Austria. The problem was, the rear end wasn't going that far and Ray faced being stranded in Poland. "My visa would've expired and I would've been in the wrong part of the world. The authorities wanted to arrest me so they could get foreign exchange out of me."

During the train trip, a group of young Polish nationals noticed Ray's discomfort and fear. Another woman was also in the same position, so these plucky Poles decided to create a diversion at the next stop. "These wonderful Poles started this riot on the platform, despite having machineguns trained on them."

Meanwhile, Ray and the woman grabbed their bags and raced along the offside of the train towards the right carriage. "The Poles up the front could see there was a run going on, so they wound down the windows and pulled us in."

Ray made it safely to Austria, but never knew what happened to the brave ones who distracted the authorities. He remains ever thankful for their daring actions.

Miracle in the mail

Back in New Zealand, Ray became more involved in the Polish community and researching his genealogy from a safer distance.

After years of investigations he made contact with a photographer from Poland, who was selling videos of relatives' home villages. "He told me there was a Watembach still living in the city of Chojnice (pronounced Hoy-neet-sa)."

Knowing the unreliable state of the Polish mail service, Ray did his best. "I wrote a letter without a proper address and asked God for a miracle and I got one."

Within 10 days, he got a letter back that confirmed that powerful feeling of being called home. "There was old lady still alive," he says, choked with emotion.

He clears the air by explaining how he felt holding that amazing letter. "Yippee! Absolutely over the moon!"

Call of Poland

So, Ray and sister Shirley went to Poland.

This was at the end of the 1980s, just before the Berlin Wall came down between East and West Germany. Thousands of people were fleeing the East, so police were out in force questioning everybody and making travel difficult.

Somehow, Ray and Shirley made it to Poland, arriving in Posnan at 3am. Facing another 10 hours of travelling, they decided to take a taxi to Chojnice and arrived five hours earlier than expected.

So, at 7am, the Kiwi Watembachs were face to face with their Polish namesakes. Because their guests were five hours early, the hosts were more stunned than excited. "But they made us very welcome," Ray says.

The old woman turned out to be Hidegarda Wattenbach, born in 1919. She died in 1992.

Time of healing

Ray returned to Poland in 1995, just five years after the Communist regime had fallen. He found a different country.

"In five years the Poles had produced 800 books dealing with life under the Germans and under the Russians. They detailed names and times that people were taken away to be murdered and provided details families still looking for relatives long after the war (WWII) ended. It was a great time of grieving and healing, because there had been no closure," he says.

"The Russians slaughtered one-and-a-half-million Poles and they kept killing them right up to 1949 as they tried to exterminate all possible resistance to Russianism and Communism."

Incredible journey

In 2001, Ray and Shirley were there to attend a symposium looking at the progress made in Poland since the fall of Communism.

Because they were the first New Zealanders to ever attend the symposium (in its ninth year), they were interviewed on radio and television about their Watembach and Dodunski family links.

On the other side of Poland, Stan Dodunski was listening to Gdansk Radio. "He closed his business, got his wife into the car and drove a great distance across Poland to where we were, visiting a Kashubian fishing village on the Hel Peninsula," Ray says.

The Dodunski connection

"We arrived for lunch at a hotel and were astounded to find Stanislaw and Jola waiting for us. The symposium organisers, thrilled at our reunion after 125 years apart, shouted them dinner as well. They accompanied us every day for the rest of the symposium and when it ended came and collected us, along with Paul Klemick from the South Island and drove us back to their house and showed us various parts of Poland."

It turned out that Stan was the last male Dodunski left in the East European country, so was delighted to discover that branches of his family were thriving in Taranaki.

When Ray and Shirley were back home, they decided to show Stan the extent of the Dodunski clan living under the gaze of Mt Taranaki.

"We sent him a page from the phonebook," Ray says.

The name Dodunski appears in the white pages of the Taranaki 2002-03 phonebook 52 times.

Long List: Ray Watembach has counted up 52 Dodunskis in the Taranaki phone book.